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Zekk Pacus' AMD Ryze(n) hardware thread, July 2017

Welcome to yet another edition of Zekk's wild and wacky hardware threads! This time we actually have two CPU manufacturers duking it out (rather than one CPU manufacturer making CPUs and the other one making novelty items), just like old days.

Low-end machines are for hard budgets, non-AAA/low res gaming and general PC usage.
Mid-range machines are aimed at 1080p gaming at mostly high settings.
The high-end machines are the VR suitable, 4k beasts.

Usual caveats apply:

Builds are heavily skewed towards hardware I know and trust, either because I've used it, used similar, or read many reviews. In many cases I haven't used parts that I would generally use because I like to recommend stuff that I know is rock-solid reliable over cheaper/faster.

They are also skewed towards what I want out of a machine/my priorities.

I make no assertion that I am the best source of hardware info on this forum. Several other posters know just as much or more than I do.

These builds are designed as starting points, not finished products. PCPartPicker makes it easy as fuck to chop and change the build to suit you. Do so, take advantage of their BBCode functionality to post it, and always ask if you're not sure.

I haven't included an Operating System. Windows 10 will install with a valid 7 or 8.1 CD key as of time of writing - Microsoft don't advertise this and they might change it at any time.

For the first time ever I haven't included optical drives. Madness! I also don't include peripherals because y'know. I might do an updated mouse/keyboard/headset thread.

Some other, non-usual caveats:

Prices are volatile as fuck. Memory is expensive and not getting any cheaper, SSDs have hit a price floor over the last six months. I have broken my usual budget structure somewhat on both the mid-range machines to account for this.

Graphics card prices are volatile as fucksquared. They are beginning to stabilise but there is no way of knowing what they are going to settle at until AT LEAST the end of August and probably much beyond that, it depends what happens with cryptocurrency. I have used MRSPs or cards that are deliberately out of stock where possible - my advice to you is to set up an alert on PCPartPicker or CamelCamelCamel at a price you can stand that's not too far off the MRSP, and wait.

All my prices are in GBP Sterling which is fuckcubed because Brexit. You might find my builds come in well under or well over your budget in your own local currency. Sorry, not my fault.

As ever with the Intel low budget machine, it's for dyed-in-the-wool Intel fanboys only. I'd really prefer to put a 560 in it over the 460 but it pushes over the budget too far. Dual core isn't enough for gaming anymore, so this machine is strictly for non-AAA gaming/low res gaming.

The Ryzen 3 will beat out lower end i3 CPUs in favourable benchmarks and at least holds its own, and handily beats the Pentium in the other system. Skipping the HDD allows a GTX 1050 Ti but you could drop to an RX460/560 if you were building from scratch. I haven't included a CPU cooler but you could add one for about £20.

Yes, you read that. I am recommending a £1000 AMD machine over a £1000 Intel machine.

The Ryzen beats out the Intel machine in the vast majority of games - there are a very few CPU-bound games where the specific use case meets the i5's strengths and then the i5 performs better, but both machines keep the games well within playable at 1080p, and the Ryzen has stronger real-world performance in non-gaming stats. Graphics card can literally be either/or - the GTX1060 and RX580 are similarly priced and trade blows in games.

Ryzen 5 is the current king of mid-range systems for me. 4 threads hasn't been enough for a while now and Intel knew it, they just didn't think they had to worry because people would just have to buy i7. They were wrong. The Ryzen 5 in this build is a 6c/12t CPU that beats out an i5-7600k in 90% of benchmarks. As mentioned on the Intel build there are a few cases where the i5 beats it, but in the majority of use cases, Ryzen 5 > i5.

The stock cooler that comes with this CPU is more than adequate - replace it if you want to go for SERIOUS overclocking but it's perfectly capable of a respectable overclock on its own, if a little loud.

Much as with the mid-range machines, this one's not all that considering. The insane price of the X299 platform (£230 for a fairly basic motherboard) necessitates dropping the graphics card down from where I'd like to be without smashing the budget wide open - you could half the SSD and lose the spinner if you already have one and get the 1080 in there within budget, and much like the mid-range systems this one doesn't have any clear advantage over the AMD machine below. I did consider i7-7700K but then it loses even harder to the AMD machine in productivity without really gaining anything back in gaming - much like the mid-range machines, they'll trade blows. Worth noting AMD has been making major improvements in gaming performance with recent BIOS updates, and as developers get more time with the Ryzen architecture and start to understand how to optimize for it we should see this more and more.

Very few surprises here. The board supports all the usual gamer features, stuck with the very dependable G2 650W PSU - this will need changing if you want to SLI. The 1080 is more than capable of 4k gaming and 1080 Ti prices are beyond ridiculous. I haven't gone with the Ryzen 1800x purely because the extra 70 quid isn't worth a 4% increase in performance. 16GB of RAM should be more than enough especially given current RAM prices. As discussed elsewhere, for PURELY gaming workloads the Intel chips have the edge, but it's far from clear-cut with the two chips trading blows and developers are starting to understand the Ryzen architecture better, plus the high pricing of the X299 platform meaning you can get a lot more machine out of an AMD board at the same build level.

Last edited by Zekk Pacus; August 7 2017 at 08:07:35 PM.

'I'm pro life. I'm a non-smoker. I'm a pro-life non-smoker. WOO, Let the party begin!'

Why are you buying a cooler for a Ryzen 1600 series? They ship with a fine one, at least the non-X does. Who's actually overclocking a new 12+threaded CPU in 2017??

Also, budget, you just can't justify buying anything so soon to Ryzen 3 arriving, considering the huge (~30%) CPU price savings AMD are offering for at least matching performance vs intel.
And £500 for a dual core sounds like madness, surely there's some Dell or laptop pre-built that's highly comparable, let alone 2nd hand/ex-display options.
At least don't be putting more into the SSD than the CPU for that mindset, you'd be fine with half the SSD space, carry over an old drive, and get an actual CPU worth still owning next yet.
TL;DR: seems like all sorts of false economy. At least it's DDR4 RAM & GPU slots aren't changing any time soon.

As a RX460 owner, seconding the recommendation for use in low-end boxes. It's not awesome, but it gets the job done, with low power consumption to boot.

As was said, a 560 would be better, but the performance gain doesn't justify the price difference. However, if the current crunch for better cards doesn't let up (fuck miners), it might be worth a look.

Last edited by Nordstern; July 18 2017 at 04:21:34 PM.

"Holy shit, I ask you to stop being autistic and you debate what autistic is." - spasm

Why are you buying a cooler for a Ryzen 1600 series? They ship with a fine one, at least the non-X does. Who's actually overclocking a new 12+threaded CPU in 2017??

The X doesn't, and anyone who wants to overclock will want the X as it's a higher binned part. If they're not overclocking, no reason to buy the X and I'd recommend the 1600 instead. The stock AMD coolers are indeed good coolers.

Also, budget, you just can't justify buying anything so soon to Ryzen 3 arriving, considering the huge (~30%) CPU price savings AMD are offering for at least matching performance vs intel.
And £500 for a dual core sounds like madness, surely there's some Dell or laptop pre-built that's highly comparable, let alone 2nd hand/ex-display options.
At least don't be putting more into the SSD than the CPU for that mindset, you'd be fine with half the SSD space, carry over an old drive, and get an actual CPU worth still owning next yet.
TL;DR: seems like all sorts of false economy. At least it's DDR4 RAM & GPU slots aren't changing any time soon.

I agree, that's why the space for the Ryzen 3 build is there. It'll most likely be my recommended budget platform, but I've always done one of each build for the hardware threads. To be honest the Intel low budget builds have always been a bit meh - the only time that changed was the anniversary edition Pentium. There are probably pre-built machines that are comparable, outside the scope of the hardware thread really. You're right about the SSD and it's an unbalanced machine - on reflection I might change that to an RX 560 or even a GTX 1050 Ti and drop the SSD down.

With GPUs as stated I have used MRSPs where possible or deliberately out of stock cards where not (they won't have had their price fucked about with quite so much).

I really think I might change the mid-range builds to the GTX 1070 with lower storage. Price is still disgusting (around £100 above MRSP) but it's a workable build. Thoughts, all?

Last edited by Zekk Pacus; July 18 2017 at 07:50:47 PM.

'I'm pro life. I'm a non-smoker. I'm a pro-life non-smoker. WOO, Let the party begin!'

Have updated the OP with the high-end builds. Also added a bit about Windows 10 that I forgot to add to the original post.

I've gone with the Thermalright cooler over the Noctua cooler for the high-end builds because there's been some concern about Noctua fans coming out of China recently and until I see a response from Noctua I'm not happy recommending them. It's most likely nothing.

Last edited by Zekk Pacus; July 23 2017 at 01:59:03 PM.

'I'm pro life. I'm a non-smoker. I'm a pro-life non-smoker. WOO, Let the party begin!'

Also, could be worth noting that the last few times I have installed win10, there hasn't been a single mention of activation. No codes entered. Nothing. I even just yesterday created a new install with a new outlook account (in case it was tied to something I dunno).

This might help reduce cost. I will post an update if these suddenly stop working or start telling me off.

Yep. You can install it without a key and it'll mention it's not activated but other than that will work fine. Win 10 is much more ecosystem focused than previous Windows, and that's what they're banking on.

'I'm pro life. I'm a non-smoker. I'm a pro-life non-smoker. WOO, Let the party begin!'

Also, could be worth noting that the last few times I have installed win10, there hasn't been a single mention of activation. No codes entered. Nothing. I even just yesterday created a new install with a new outlook account (in case it was tied to something I dunno).

When you install and activate Windows 10 the first time on a PC it creates a 'digital entitlement' signature unique to that hardware, which is sent to Microsoft's activation servers and permanently stored there. If you ever re-install Windows later, the activation system will check if there's a digital entitlement that matches your hardware. If there is then Windows 10 should auto activate, no key necessary; this is done during the later stages of setup so you never even get prompted for a key, and Windows will be activated by time you get to the desktop. The only reason it should fail to activate is if your original Windows 10 key was a retail key and you've re-used it on other hardware.

Also, if you previously configured Windows to use a Microsoft account then the Windows 10 key is linked to that account. If you've had Win 10 installed on the system before, Windows will auto activate as soon as you log in with your Microsoft account.

The Windows 10 activation system is actually about as forgiving as possible without removing it altogether (which I suspect they will do at some point).

Also, could be worth noting that the last few times I have installed win10, there hasn't been a single mention of activation. No codes entered. Nothing. I even just yesterday created a new install with a new outlook account (in case it was tied to something I dunno).

When you install and activate Windows 10 the first time on a PC it creates a 'digital entitlement' signature unique to that hardware, which is sent to Microsoft's activation servers and permanently stored there. If you ever re-install Windows later, the activation system will check if there's a digital entitlement that matches your hardware. If there is then Windows 10 should auto activate, no key necessary; this is done during the later stages of setup so you never even get prompted for a key, and Windows will be activated by time you get to the desktop. The only reason it should fail to activate is if your original Windows 10 key was a retail key and you've re-used it on other hardware.

Also, if you previously configured Windows to use a Microsoft account then the Windows 10 key is linked to that account. If you've had Win 10 installed on the system before, Windows will auto activate as soon as you log in with your Microsoft account.

The Windows 10 activation system is actually about as forgiving as possible without removing it altogether (which I suspect they will do at some point).

gotcha, the new account i did was for a laptop where i created a win10 install on a hard drive and mounted it in a HDD caddy.

Why are you buying a cooler for a Ryzen 1600 series? They ship with a fine one, at least the non-X does. Who's actually overclocking a new 12+threaded CPU in 2017??

The X doesn't, and anyone who wants to overclock will want the X as it's a higher binned part. If they're not overclocking, no reason to buy the X and I'd recommend the 1600 instead. The stock AMD coolers are indeed good coolers.

Actually, the non-X seems to overclock just as well as the X for most people. With some effort they all top out at roughly 4 GHz anyway. Most sites are recommending the non-X because of that, combined with the healthy price difference and the missing cooler on the X. Personally I'm planning to buy an 1600X in the near future, so I agree with your suggested build, but not everyone does.